Jon Talton - Camelback Falls

“Oh, David, I thought I didn’t have to worry about this anymore. I just thought he’d be a politician now. All those years when he’d go to work and I never knew if he’d…”

We all silently stared at the wall. Sharon said, “God, I still remember that night in Guadalupe, back in 1979, when you and he were patrol deputies. You remember?”

I nodded, recalling a bad shooting years ago. Peralta was a hero. I was scared shitless. If he was, it never showed. I said, “He came out of that just fine, Sharon, and he’s going to now.”

“Oh, David,” she said dully, “you don’t have to baby me…” She let the sentence trail off, then something bright and fierce crossed her face. “David, his insulin.”

I didn’t make the leap with her. She said, “He’ll have to have his insulin.”

I patted her hand. “Sharon, it’s a hospital, they have everything right here.”

“David, he’s got to have it. It’s his prescription. Please. It’s in his office refrigerator. Please do this for me.” She took a heavy gold key off a ring and handed it out. “This is to his office.”

I started to say something, but Lindsey put a hand on my shoulder.

“We’ll be here, Dave,” she said, looking at me full-on with those incredible blue eyes. “Don’t be long.”

I gave in to the irrational requests of the terrified and took the key.

***

A few minutes later, I used the side entrance to the Sheriff’s Office headquarters building on Madison Street downtown. I avoided the clots of employees, all awaiting the same news I did. I took the shortcut down an empty corridor where an unmarked door was the back entrance into Peralta’s office.

The outgoing sheriff had just moved out of his office that morning, and the county, in the inscrutable wisdom of large bureaucracies, was waiting two weeks to give the place new carpeting, drapes, and paint. So here I was in the familiar room where Chief Deputy Peralta held court all these years. The big desktop was bare and the credenza behind it was piled two feet high with reports. The county seal and Arizona state flag sat photogenically in one corner. An entire wall held photos from Peralta’s career. A framed map of the county took up another wall, the yellow urban mass spread ever more into the desert. It was a room where Peralta would sit with his boots up on the desk and philosophize about crime and punishment. Or bark at me, and not affectionately, about the progress on a case. It looked reassuring and familiar, and the events of the past hour were just outside the door.

I squatted before the small refrigerator, and fished past a couple dozen caffeine-free Diet Cokes. I pulled out the insulin bottles and tucked them in my pocket. Peralta had never admitted to me that he had diabetes, and when Sharon told me a couple of years ago I was surprised to realize this invincible man, who seemed incapable of mere human emotions like fear or sentimentality, was as vulnerable as any of us.

I closed up the refrigerator, and as I stood, my eye went to Peralta’s beaten-up Franklin Planner, resting precariously on a pile of files. It was open to today, and of course he’d made no notation of the most important event of his career. On the facing page was only one item to do. It read: “Mapstone-Camelback Falls.”

Camelback Falls? I made a quick mental list of everything he had me working on: the unsolved disappearance of the minister’s wife from 1964; a reassessment of a murder investigation from 1982, because the murderer had been granted a new trial; the Web version of my Sheriff’s Office history, which was actually selling well at bookstores in the Valley. I didn’t have a clue about “Camelback Falls.”

Suddenly, the side door opened and I had company.

It was Jack Abernathy, still in uniform, his bulk stretching at the fabric of the tan shirt. His Charley Tuna face reddened and his mouth crooked down.

“Mapstone, what the hell? What are you doing in here?” His voice was raspy and soft, a Texas drawl poking out on certain words.

He’d never liked me. He was old school Sheriff’s Office, where you did your time, kept your mouth shut, and didn’t think too much. I failed on all three counts.

“I had to get something for Sharon Peralta. The sheriff is in surgery now.”

He stared at me. I said in a steady voice, “What are you doing here?”

He started to speak. Then he turned suddenly and stalked out the door. Under his breath I heard, “Fuck you!”

I left the commandeered sheriff’s cruiser at headquarters to find its way home, and I drove back in Lindsey’s old white Honda Prelude. I flipped the radio over to AM, where all the news stations were reporting on the shooting of Sheriff Peralta, just hours after he was sworn in. One newscaster called it an “assassination attempt.” “Critical condition” was repeated over and over. Then the station cut to a commercial for Waterworks, a chain of waterbed stores that had somehow survived the 1970s. I felt like an ice spike was lodged in my stomach.

The horrid 1980s tower of Good Sam appeared. It looked like a spaceship from a low-budget science-fiction movie. Outside, the TV satellite trucks were stacked into the parking lot and spilling out onto Twelfth Street. Four reporters, spaced apart like saplings with a wardrobe allowance, were doing live feeds. Inside, cops guarded entrances, patrolled hallways, and stood around looking bored and fingering their gunbelts. After being challenged a half dozen times, I finally returned to the little waiting room where I’d left Lindsey and Sharon. All I wanted was for Peralta to be OK.

He wasn’t. He was in a coma.

I sat on a too-comfortable chair as Sharon, now flanked by her daughters, told me what they knew. Two bullets hit Peralta. One entered his back, missed the spine and aorta by no more than an inch, then blew out his chest, fracturing a rib. The second round hit the top of his head. The bullet fragmented, although most of it didn’t enter his skull-“His hard old head,” Sharon laughed and sniffled. Whether that was lucky enough, nobody knew. They did some exploratory surgery. They did a CAT scan. The chief of neurosurgery was called in, along with a half dozen other specialists from around the city. All they could say was that his brain had been shocked, was under pressure from swelling, and it would take time to know how serious his condition was.

Then, feeling foggy and for the first time sore from where Peralta fell on me, I followed Sharon and Lindsey past more deputies to the ICU.

“They don’t know anything” Sharon whispered vehemently, running a hand through her dark hair.

“The doctors?”

“The police,” she said.

“They didn’t make any arrests?” I demanded.

“No suspects, no motive,” Lindsey said. “How could somebody escape from a room with a thousand cops in it?”

Sharon said, “One set of detectives was asking questions about whether it was a hate crime. He’s the first Latino sheriff here. Another bunch asked if it could have been a random shooting, that he wasn’t the target. Nobody has any answers.”

I thought of all the enemies Peralta must have made in his long law enforcement career: drug dealers, skinheads, the Mexican Mafia, the Bloods and Crips, assorted killers and big-time con artists. I kept it to myself.

Then I was looking through a window at the sheriff. Only his hand was recognizable: that meaty brown fist, with the wedding band still on the ring finger. It still looked formidable. Everything else before us was a mound of gown, covers, tubes, electrodes, monitors, meters, and elaborately joined plastic bags with what looked like whole blood and some kind of IV solution. I felt sick and unreal. I put my arms around Sharon and Lindsey, and we just stood there a long time, saying nothing. A nurse in green scrubs came in and fiddled with some kind of electronic device on the IV line. Finally, Sharon said what we had all been thinking.